© » KADIST
Jordan Wolfson
Dreaming of the dream of the dream is a 16mm projection consisting of images of waves that come and go continuously. The artist has assembled extracts of cartoons in which water is visible (the sea, bubbles, a stream, waves, etc.). Somewhat nostalgic, these extracts can recall either childhood cartoons or paintings by Hokusai.
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.
© » KADIST
Clemens von Wedemeyer
Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants. It complements von Wedemeyer slightly earlier and more artistic film Silberhöhe (2003) which decried imposed Modernist living model. In Die Siedlung , a voiceover describes and criticizes the different sites on view while the camera moves slowly past a vast abandoned 1930s Nazi army barracks which has yet to be converted or demolished, the building site and wastelands for the new private single family housing area, a constructed pond and finally the 1960s or 70s communal blocks of flats.
© » KADIST
Loris Gréaud
The acronym “CFL” stands for an existing light standard (Compact Fluorescent Light) as well as a standard nutrient (Cognitive Fooding Laboratory). “CFL” is a mobile laboratory for growth of watercress shoots which contain high levels of anthocyanin – a natural pigment used by fighter pilots to increase their visual acuity at night in order to achieve better responses to light stimuli. In the work Celador, a taste of illusion (2007), the viewer is invited to consume the plants – a candy with the flavor of illusion.
© » KADIST
Allora & Calzadilla
Vieques is an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used by the U. S Navy and NATO forces as military testing ground as from the 1940s. Civil disobedience and active protest movements initiated by local inhabitants and an international support network led to the end of the bombings and progressive demilitarization in 2002.
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.
© » KADIST
John Isaacs
A child and dreamer my whole life long (broken tree) (2004) is a sculpture made of filler, wire, copper, oil paint, and wood depicting a tree just at it’s moment of breaking into half – one part alive with foliage and blooming branches and the other the crisp of the break exposed, with the trunk adhered solidly to a plinth. The sculpture appears to speak quite bluntly about Isaac’s own sense of bleak pessimism when exposing a severed tree, the universe’s sacred sign of life and birth. Through the perfect rendering of this encapsulated moment, Isaacs demonstrates the strength of the sculptural artifact and his interest in failure and fragility.
© » KADIST
Ryan Gander
You see without light is a group of photographs around the theme of Bauhaus. This includes a reference to one of Gander’s works which is the Bauhaus manifesto without dots on the letter ‘i’, as well as drawings of his ideal art school.
© » KADIST
Lu Chunsheng
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory. Using long shots and atypical settings, Lu Chunsheng enigmatically refers to a distant history while conveying the sense of dislocation wrought by successive stages of modernization. The combination of elaborate landscape shots from the suburbs of Shanghai and Lu’s signature style of spare and minimally crafted acting offers a surreal view of human behavior in spaces marked by the hulking remnants of China’s extraordinary development.
© » KADIST
Wong Hoy Cheong
Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world. The video—located in an imagined contemporary Malaysian middle-class living room, a space of a fictive former imperial power—explores the precarious link between fact and fiction, fakery and authenticity by overlaying three believable, authoritative forms: a documentary, a website, and a realistic reconstruction of a contemporary home. It is rife with occidental colonial documents and exotic cultural artifacts—the trophy-evidence of Empire-making.
© » KADIST
Chris Johanson
Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor. The works comment on subjects such as capitalism, consumerism, the art world, and therapy. The triptych I Am a Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV (2004) is a meditation on the cosmos.
© » KADIST
Allora & Calzadilla
This series of photographs is part of the body of work Allora & Calzadilla made regarding the situation in Vieques, an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used for the 60 years by the U. S Military and NATO forces to practice military bombing exercises. In 2000, they began a collaboration with the local activists to make the campaign more visible.
© » KADIST
Cao Fei
Diversionist is part of the Cosplayers Series from 2004. In Cosplayers Cao Fei depicts the popularity among Asian youths of “cosplay” in which daily life is merged with images of video games and popular films. For many, this virtual reality is an outlet to “transcend” the paradox of a developing society in which the pleasures of consumption and depression of alienation go hand-in-hand.
© » KADIST
Tino Sehgal
Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space. Upon hitting the cold, hard gallery floor, the seemingly confused interpreter writhes slowly on the ground while reciting a few lines from the curatorial statement in a whispered moan.
© » KADIST
Nathalie Djurberg
Apparently Djurberg’s mother made a puppet theater and traveled around Göteborg performing during her childhood. This short story of a young man initially listening to birdsong in a city, suddenly confronted to warfare and wounded, could visually resemble child’s doll game or mise en scène, with a high dose of cynicism and violence. The figure, Hans, is attended to by two nurses whose raw discussion appears in speech bubbles: “we’ll have to amputate”.
© » KADIST
Abraham Cruzvillegas
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials. The title is a reference to a building Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Tokyo, which was completed in 1923. In its heyday, which lasted until after World War II, the hotel was reserved for elite personnel, many of them foreigners.
© » KADIST
Guy Ben-Ner
Wild Boy is the story of the education of Amir, the artist’s son. Ben-Ner plays the educator’s part, trying to domesticate the child. Using the metaphor of the wild child is Ben-Ner’s homage to this recurring theme in literature and cinema: from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ « Tarzan » to Truffaut’s « L’enfant sauvage », and Rudyard Kipling’s « Jungle book ».
© » KADIST
Felix Gmelin
Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive. Filmed from a fixed point, it portrays his father in an intimate performance of body painting with a woman unknown to Felix Gmelin. The discovery of this footage was obviously disturbing.
© » KADIST
Moshekwa Langa
Hybridized drawing is a continued exploration in Moshekwa’s practice, integrating elements of graffiti, thread and yarn to enrich his abstract drawings of maps and space. Through the combination of ready-found materials with drawing, in the case of “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)”, employing string, Moshekwa’s creates tension lines across the image, both physical and metaphysical to explore the traumatic events of South Africa and more specifically the passing of his grandmother. Referencing gestural painting of the 1940s and 50s, “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)” is a disfigured and layered mapping of both the African and psychological landscape.
© » KADIST
Daria Martin
Soft Materials is a curious, touching but also disturbing sequence of confrontations between two people: a man and a woman, and machines. Shot in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, the humans and the machines mirror each other’s actions. It is unclear which party takes the lead.
© » KADIST
H.H. Lim (Hooi Hwa)
Images is a two channel video work addressing the relationship between art and ritual. On the left side, the artist is filmed in a sparse, red room with his tongue nailed onto a red table. With Lim’s freedom of movement and speech limited, the viewer focuses on the facial expressions of the artist as different streams of thoughts and realizations enter his mind.
© » KADIST
Loris Gréaud
This work refers to the “Dream Machines”, an experimental object invented by the painter and writer Brion Gysin and the scientist Ian Sommerville, and which is composed of a light bulb with light passing through slits in a rotating cylinder. Loris Gréaud revisits the structural mechanism; the light variations, following the frequency shift of the “ Dream Machines”,, which is transcribed here by the undulations of the light produced by the filament lamps. Beyond this technological reference, the artist also quotes stories, legends, rumors about this invention in order to crystallize them in a contemporary technological object.
© » KADIST
Yto Barrada
In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe. They become like abstract paintings that recall Modernist formal experimentation. They are somehow symptomatic of the circulation of goods and people that is made to sound so abstract.
© » KADIST
Ben Kinmont
The archive proposes to examine the difference between helping others in the context of an artistic project and in the context of social work in order to question authorship. The first part of Digger Dug made in 2004 was reactivated during the Kadist exhibition, for instance as an exchange with an anthropologist concerning ethics in projects that are both artistic and social. Thus the archive contained a new text and a series of photographs, videos and notes made during the exhibition.
© » KADIST
Michel François
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
In Michel François’s work, « it is the real, physical and emotional experience that stimulates creation which is therefore highly charged with a vital force. There lies also the profoundly and clandestine figurative nature of his work » (Guillaume Désanges). Contamination is a constant in Michel François’s work.
© » KADIST
Ryan Gander
Ryan Gander is a collector. He keeps all sorts of documents to create from. His studio is full of found images, personal images, documents copied from internet or cutout of newspapers.
© » KADIST
Mikhael Subotzky
“Pasvang, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison” is the result of three months Subotzky spent inside the walls of Pollsmoor Prison, an overcrowded correctional facility largely controlled by gangs. Through talking to the prisoners and the warders, teaching classes in photography to the inmates and documenting his experiences, Subotzky captured a unique perspective of the prisoners and the prison itself. Subotzky was working digitally, and a key feature of the Pollsmoor work was panoramic images in which he would stitch together a number of shots to give a 360-degree view of the jammed prison wards and spaces.
© » KADIST
Jean-Luc Moulène
It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000 , which could be the refrain of a song, is the title of a photograph of a minimal moment, the vision of a Parisian pedestrian, a cut flower lying on the pavement covered in rain drops. Is this moment captured by chance or a mise en scène? There is a sort of hiatus in the image; the planes – motif and background – connect nature in full bloom, pure, fragile, ephemeral with the grey weighty tarmac.
© » KADIST
Kelley Walker
The triptych Black Star Press is part of the series ‘The Black Star Press project’ initiated in 2004 by the American artist Kelley Walker. The images in this series are taken from a photo essay on the struggle for civil rights in Alabama, directed by Charles Moore in 1962 (and published by the magazine ‘Life’) which showed the repression of the black population and persistent inequalities in the southern United States. The title “Black Star Press” is taken from the name of the news agency where Charles Moore worked, and it refers to the young black man shot fighting for the rights of his community.
Ryan Gander
- location: Chester, United Kingdom
- year born: 1976
- gender: male
- nationality: British
Allora & Calzadilla
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla comprise the artistic duo Allora & Calzadilla...
Kelley Walker
- location: Columbus, United States
- year born: 1969
- gender: male
- nationality: American
Ben Kinmont
Since the late 1980s Ben Kinmont has been interested in interpersonal communication as a means of addressing the problems of contemporary society...
Mikhael Subotzky
Mikhael Subotzky’s (b...
Pavel Wolberg
Pavel Wolberg studied photography at the Camera Obscura School of Art in Tel Aviv...
John Isaacs
John Isaacs’ work encompasses many different media, though much of it has origins in sculpture...
Chris Ofili
- location: Manchester, United Kingdom
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: British
Clemens von Wedemeyer
- location: Göttingen, Deutschland
- year born: 1974
- gender: male
- nationality: German
Felix Gmelin
With a degree in painting and inspired by so-called institutional criticism, Felix Gmelin is interested in the possibilities of painting as a form of resistance and its direct relation to a form of socio-political reality...
Guy Ben-Ner
In his films, Guy Ben-Ner plays with the history of cinema, referring to the experimental origins of silent film, to comic figures such as Keaton and Chaplin, and to Truffaut’s French New Wave...
Douglas Gordon
- location: Berlin, Germany
- year born: 1966
- gender: male
- nationality: Scottish
- home town: Glasgow, United Kingdom
Abraham Cruzvillegas
- location: Mexico
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Mexico City, Mexico
Lu Chunsheng
- location: Shanghai, China
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Changchun, Jilin province, China
Moshekwa Langa
The oeuvre of Moshekwa Langa (b...
Jordan Wolfson
Jordan Wolfson is often defined as a romantic conceptualist indeed his work tends to subvert material conditions of the art world and question contemporary socio-cultural or religious stereotypes with a great deal of highly strung melancholy, humor or cynicism...
Wong Hoy Cheong
- location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- year born: 1960
- gender: male
- nationality: Malaysian
- home town: George Town, Malaysia
Nathalie Djurberg
In the late 1990s, Nathalie Djurberg started to work with Super 8 film, then video, staging plasticine models or puppets...
Tino Sehgal
- location: Berlin, Germany
- year born: 1976
- gender: male
- nationality: British-German
- home town: London, United Kingdom
H.H. Lim (Hooi Hwa)
H...
Mario Garcia Torres
- location: Mexico City, Mexico
- year born: 1975
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Monclova, Mexico
Cao Fei
- location: Beijing, China
- year born: 1978
- gender: female
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Guangzhou, China
Dennis Adams
Since 1998, through site specific works, often in public spaces, or video works, Dennis Adams focuses on ambiguous characters, condemned by our recent history, revealing traumas or collective amnesia phenomena...
Daria Martin
A number of Daria Martin’s films explore the relationship between humans and machines and make reference to modernist art, whether through the work of the Bauhuas (Schlemmer), Surrealism (Giacometti’s Palace at 4 AM) or American art of the 1960s and 1970s...
Daniel Joseph Martinez
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1957
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: Los Angeles, California
Mark Leckey
- year born: 1964
- gender: male
- nationality: British
- home town: Birkenhead, United Kingdom
SUPERFLEX
SUPERFLEX work on a number of projects linked to their avowed interest in political and social engagement on a local scale...
Yto Barrada
- location: Tangier, Morocco
- year born: 1971
- gender: male
- nationality: French-Moroccan
- home town: Paris, France
Chris Johanson
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1968
- gender: male
- nationality: American
- home town: San Jose, California